Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount exposed several flaws in the state’s election system, and a legislative committee Friday started considering ways to improve how Minnesotans vote.

State and local election officials said the system is basically sound. Minnesota led the nation in voter turnout (78 percent), and the state canvassing board confirmed 99.97 percent of local election judges’ decisions, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told the Senate government operations committee. “This recount is a model for the nation.”

But 12,000 absentee ballots were rejected. That was the “most glaring problem” in the election, said Common Cause Minnesota executive director Mike Dean.

While the recount focused attention on 1,350 improperly rejected absentee ballots, Ritchie said he is equally concerned about the 10,000-plus early ballots that were “rightly rejected.” He said he would soon propose changes that would make it easier to vote absentee and ensure those votes are counted.

The number of voters casting absentee ballots is growing rapidly.

Those voters should be allowed to track the status of their mail-in votes online, Keesha Gaskins, executive director of the League of Women Voters Minnesota, and Ramsey County elections manager Joe Mansky proposed.

Under current law, voters must state a reason for voting before Election Day to get an absentee ballot. To make early voting easier, Gaskin called for “no-excuse absentee ballots.”

Mansky, representing county auditors and city clerks, went a step further, urging lawmakers to allow more “early voting” using machines at voting centers and more evening and weekend early-voting options. That would eliminate the cost and confusion caused by the paperwork required for casting absentee ballots, he said.

Committee Chair Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, said legislators would take a “serious look” at authorizing early voting. They also will try to reduce the number of rejected absentee ballots, she said.

That decision disenfranchised voters and was the “low point in the recount,” said Mark Halvorson, director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Election Integrity in Minnesota.

Dean said the Franken campaign used that ruling to veto ballots in Republican counties, while the Coleman campaign did the same thing in Democratic counties.

“I think that allowing political campaigns to decide the standards for accepting or rejecting an absentee ballot is an intrusion of partisanship that should not be allowed,” Rest said.

She vowed to push legislation that would, in effect, overturn the high court ruling and bar political campaigns from making decisions about ballot validity. Local election judges should be responsible for those decisions, she said.

The canvassing board spent much of its two weeks of deliberation trying to discern the intentions of voters who failed to fill in the oval next to a Senate candidate’s name on the ballot and thus was not counted by the machines.

That prompted Sen. Dick Day, R-Owatonna, to ask why the state should bother to recount the votes of people who can’t fill in a simple oval.

“The founders of our nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution did not require that citizens only be able to vote if they can comply with the demands of a machine manufacturer,” Ritchie replied.

“My grandmother — sharp as a tack until the day she died — shook. She could not fill in a circle,” he said, his voice rising with emotion. “It breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother and that somebody is saying she should not be allowed to vote because a machine manufactured by a company in Taiwan cannot take her vote.”

He said the state should not disenfranchise citizens who “can’t fill in an oval because they’ve gotten old.”

Bill Salisbury has been a newspaper reporter since 1971. He started covering the Minnesota Capitol for the Rochester Post-Bulletin in 1975, joined the Pioneer Press as a general assignment reporter in 1977 and was assigned to the Capitol bureau in 1978. He was the paper's Washington correspondent from 1994 through 1999, when he returned to the Capitol bureau. Although he retired in January 2015, he continues to work at the Capitol part time.

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